New ‘Miss Peregrine’ trilogy welcomes worlds

And you thought Florida already was full of peculiar folks.

The fantasy world of Ransom Riggs’ popular Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Chil

dren series heads to America in the upcoming fourth book. USA TODAY can reveal the jacket, the title — A Map of Days

— and the on-sale date, Oct. 2.

The novel kicks off a new trilogy in Riggs’ best-selling young-adult saga, which began with 2011’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and was adapted into a 2016 film.

A Map of Days catches up with Jacob Portman returning to his Florida home after helping save “the peculiars” (people with special powers) from a monstrous threat. After traveling to 1940 and back, Jacob, love interest Emma, their protector Miss Peregrine and their friends are trying to blend into their new environment in the present day — which means beach visits and doing their best to be normal.

“I always envisioned the world of the peculiars as one that spans the globe, not just the U.K., so setting this story in America let me explore a whole new peculiar society,” Riggs says. “It’s a dramatic opening-up of the universe.”

The original books, the author says, told a “fish-out-of-water story in which Jacob discovers this unfamiliar world of peculiars, and I’ve been having lots of fun turning that on its head, throwing his peculiar friends into the equally alien-tothem world of modern-day America.”

Jacob’s grandfather Abe had a double life as a peculiar operative — previous books hinted at how Abe spent decades raising a family while secretly going on missions to kill hollowgasts, horrifying creatures that consume peculiars to regain their human form. Jacob finds a subterranean bunker that used to be his granddad’s and will discover more about his exploits, Riggs says. “He’ll also learn that Abe didn’t work alone, that his closest hollow-hunting brother-inarms is still alive, and that the missions may be far from over.”

The title A Map of Days refers to the temporal atlas that pinpoints the locations of time loops in the peculiar world, Riggs says. “The loops of America are largely unmapped and unknown, however — especially to Miss Peregrine and her European counterparts — so finding and/or creating an American Map of Days quickly becomes a priority for them, if not an obsession.”

Vintage photographs of children on the cover and inside have been a signa- ture of the Miss Peregrine’s novels, and the one on the A Map of Days jacket comes from a friend’s photo collection.

“It’s beautiful and fascinating, and the girl has a melancholy about her that exemplifies some of the book’s big themes,” he says. “Like all the kids on my covers, she’s also a character you’ll meet in the story.”

One big change: a mix of black-andwhite and, for the first time, full-color pictures. While there’s no replacing two-toned photos for “the bizarro creep factor that I love in old photographs,” Riggs says, he wanted to introduce color “because I so strongly associate America’s recent history with that oversaturated Kodachrome look: the tacky Americana of the ’50s and ’60s, the diners and motels and big hair and weird roadside tourist traps.

“I wanted to throw the peculiars into that America, and for me, that America had to be in color.”